Add Pics to Your Calendar with Moredays

Calendars are very personalized utilities, detailing an individual’s most important events and tasks, and maybe letting them jot down a note or two. No wonder visual calendars are all the rage these days. Fans seem to be in love with the ability to tailor their daily, weekly and monthly timetables just a little bit more with the pictures and artworks of their choosing.

Add to this function an ability to create alerts, visual sorting features and managing easy-to-create entries and the combination equals Moredays, the app that prides itself on being a digital planner that blends elements of a scrapbook. Can Moredays be a great addition to your app collection? Find out on the other side of the break.

Getting Started

To begin, you will be given a quick tutorial on how to use the app with a set of sketch-style drawings. You may not need it, though, as Moredays is fairly user-friendly, but having this initial demonstration isn’t such a terrible thing. Be warned: It appears that once you skim through this tutorial, it disappears. If there’s any part of the teachings that seem a little tricky or you want to remember some way to execute a certain action, you may want to snap a photo for future reference.

Moredays initial tutorial teaches you everything you’ll need to know to use the app.

Getting started with Moredays is jump-in simple. You’ll register here with an email address and by filling in a few basic details about yourself. Once you’re set up, you can dive right in to adding Events, Tasks or Notes. Naturally, each can be created within its individual tab in Moredays. But if you aren’t sure what an entry will become (maybe a Note idea has the potential to evolve into an Event and so on), you can click on the Inbox tab. This catch-all will direct you to the most appropriate type of entry, where you can set times and dates, and add any reminder alerts that you might need to make sure the item is completed on time.

Adding Pictures

By this point, you’ve probably entered a name for your Event, Note or Task in the caption box. Afterward, you can click on the Add Image button to put some visual spice into the item. Pull an image from your camera roll, photo stream or even snap a fresh picture for the entry that you are creating. Note that these pictures you snap in app are only available within Moredays and will not appear anywhere else on your iOS device.

Select a Sketch for your event (left) and add a Stamp to classify it (right).

Upon selecting your desired picture, Moredays will take you to a page where you’ll “crop” your picture. Here, the process is more of a “fit the image into a square” scenario. What you can cram into that box is what will later show up on what constitutes your home page for this app’s iPhone version or the Sketcher tab on the iPad.

What the home page and the Sketcher equate to are the daily, weekly or monthly presentations of your calendar items. Depending on which of these you are checking out, all the appropriate items should be listed here, as will featured the image you attached.

Even More in Moredays

Selecting the Add Image button will also allow you to select an image from Moredays’ Sketches gallery. These can be used just like pictures to jazz up your appointments. As if adding pictures and Sketches wasn’t enough, you can also add stamps to your entries. Stamps are little pieces of artwork that you can attach to an item along with the picture. A Stamp is sort of like a visual tag.

Add an alert when creating an event (left) after you’ve added pictures and stamps (right).

For example, say you go out to eat a lot and you choose the hamburger Stamp to indicate any event revolving around dining. You would be able to scan through the items you have scheduled and see how many of them involve a fork and knife.

How About Contacts?

Along with being an all-in-one app, Moredays promises to combine even more utilities with its Contacts. As of now, synching Moredays’ Contacts with your Google contacts is not a possibility. Adding contacts in the iPhone version is also not a possible at this point. However, the iPad version will let you add contacts, but these need to be done one at a time with you typing in the information rather than pulling it from Google or any other address book.

Get a comprehensive view of Events, Notes and Tasks (left), or just skim through one type (right).

Within Moredays, you can add such details such birthdates and social media accounts, along with addresses and phone numbers. As an added bonus, a map feature will pin your contact’s physical dwelling.

Does Moredays Add Up?

While visually appealing, Moredays definitely has a few bugs to work out. During the review process, it crashed multiple times during the initial use of the app on an iPhone. This mostly came while trying to add pictures to events, which then usually lead to freezing and then being taken back to the phone’s home screen. Sometimes these actions resulted in all the text data entered into an item being lost and requiring re-entry. The iPad version also had problems of the flashing-light variety during its initial sign-up process, but after a little bit of use, both versions seemed to work fine when it came to the basics.

Also, alerts that were scheduled for Tasks were very hit-or-miss when it came to performance. Sometimes they would pop up on screen, other times they wouldn’t. Sometimes when they wouldn’t, the app appeared to have checked of the “completed” checkmark, which could give a false sense of accomplishment to those relying on this to keep up with tasks.

If these items can be fixed, then Moredays has the potential to be a great app for managing life. For now, though, it definitely succeeds in making things more pleasant with pictures and sketches.